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Paul Tran

ELEGY WITH MY MOTHER’S LIPSTICK

I climb down to the beach facing the Pacific Ocean. Torrents of rain shirr the sand. On the other side, my grandmother sleeps soundlessly in her bed. Her áo dài of the whitest silk. My mother knew her mother died long before the telephone rang like bells announcing the last American helicopter leaving Sài Gòn. An arrow shot back to its bow, a long-distance missile, she’d leap into the sky to fly home if she could. She works overtime instead. She curls her hair with hot rollers, rouges her cheeks like Gong Li in Raise the Red Lantern, and I’m her understudy. Hiding in the doorways between her grief and mine, I apply her foundation to my face. I conceal the parts of me she conceals, puckering my lips as though dangerously kissing a man that loves me the way I want to be loved. I speak their bewitching names aloud: Twisted Rose, Fuchsia in Paris, Irreverence. I choose the lipstick she least approves. My mouth a pomegranate split open, a grenade with its loose pin. In the kitchen, I wrap a white sheet around my waist and dance for hours, checking my reflection in a charred skillet. I laugh her laugh, the way my grandmother laughed as she taught me to pray the Chú Đại Bi. I remember braiding her hair in unbearable heat. My tiny fingers weaving silver strands into a fishtail, a French twist. Each knot a child she never got to name, buried in the soil of her, the barren plot where she keeps the relentless odor of communist soldiers locking her only surviving children away. I’m sorry, mother of my mother, bodhisattva with your thousand hands. No child in our family stays a child their mother can love. When I knew the body assigned to me wasn’t my body, when I heard the murmuring in my heart, I followed it across oceans wider than the distance now between us. I found myself on a shoreline, a shell glinting in the tide. I pressed it to my ear. It was you, still laughing, chewing a fist of betel root. Your teeth black as the unlit dawn.

BORDER FIELD STATE PARK

Crossing the salt marsh, flies laying their eggsin the belly of a gutted seal, its head yards away,its massive blue tongue jutting out, speechless,as though taunting its corpse, studying the slowdecay, the living making the dead useful again,you press your palm against my back, your pulsejolting through me, through my heart, so hard,like waves refusing to haul away the body, to givethe beast a burial, proper or improper, I can’t tellif it’s mine or yours, if what remains taunts itselfor us, teenagers cursed with being teenagers,secrets we can’t tell in fear of being sent back,of there being no back to be sent to. I face you,your face ambered by volcanic sunbeams, your lipspinched to the right, hooked by a thin silk thread,or because in the rush to assemble the rest of you,your hands pushing me into the hot sand, your godforgot to imagine your entire smile, the bright musicthat escapes from it like a boy sneaking over the borderwith his mother under a sky shot with stars, a detailwe must now live without. Because of you, I wonderwhat else we must live without, what else our gods,in their towering kingdoms, elegant and vicious,deliberate and absent-minded, forgot in our making?What else did they leave to chance or circumstance?Because of you, the closest I’d ever come to beauty,the closest I’d ever come to confession, to appealingfor a spot in Heaven, where we can both be citizensand not refugees running from the law, from la migra,from all I’m too much of a coward to admit, I gulpevery what if hammering its steel nail into my throatlike larva bursting from my stomach, demandingblood and wings, afraid of the shame I know tellingwill cause me, the shame that blooms like maggotsunder my skin because I know you can never love methat way, because I know that, despite the borderswe surmounted, there’s a border we can’t, a bordertaller and wider and more dangerous than the borderwe finally approach, patrolled and man-made, snakinginto an ocean that, like the countries we left, the futureI made hopeless with my silence, will never claim us.

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Paul Tran is a Pushcart Prize & Best of the Net-nominated poet. Their work appears in Prairie Schooner, The Cortland Review, RHINO, which gave them an Editor’s Prize, & elsewhere. Paul received fellowships & residencies from Kundiman, VONA, Poets House, Lambda Literary Foundation, Napa Valley Writers Conference, Home School, Vermont Studio Center, The Conversation, & Palm Beach Poetry Festival. They’re the first Asian American in 19 years to represent the Nuyorican Poets Cafe at the National Poetry Slam & Individual World Poetry Slam, where they placed Top 10. Paul lives in Brooklyn, where they serve as Poetry Editor at The Offing & Poet In Residence at Urban Word NYC.